North Carolina: Insurance Adjuster Fails to Show Stresses of Her Job Were Sufficient to Establish Occupational Disease Claim

Noting that in order to recover benefits for a stress-related condition under North Carolina's definition of occupational disease, it was insufficient merely to show that the employee endured "employment stressors" as a part of her work duties; the employee was required to show that her job placed her at an increased risk of contracting anxiety-related illness and/or depression as opposed to the general public not so employed, a state appellate court affirmed the Industrial Commission's denial of the employee's claim. The court acknowledged that the employee, who worked as an insurance claims adjuster, introduced evidence that she faced stress and strain in her job, but agreed that she had failed to show her job placed her at any increased risk of contracting a stress-related condition than the jobs of others in the general population.

Thomas A. Robinson, J.D., the Feature National Columnist for the LexisNexis Workers’ Compensation eNewsletter, is co-author of Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law (LexisNexis).

LexisNexis Online Subscribers: Citations below link to Lexis Advance.

See Day v. Travelers Ins. Co., 2020 N.C. App. LEXIS 578 (Aug. 4, 2020)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 52.01.

Source: Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, the nation’s leading authority on workers’ compensation law

For a more detailed discussion of the case, see

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